Exhaust gas recirculation regulating systems, boost pressure regulating systems, and air mass regulating systems are used for the emission-optimized operation of internal combustion engines. To avoid impairing emissions due to inadequate regulating performance, which may be caused by defects or aging, “on-board diagnostics” are implemented in the engine controller.
Errors may occur in systems in both steady states and in dynamic state transitions. A method for monitoring compliance with a permissible system deviation for steady operating states in regulating systems is conventional. However, this type of monitoring is often unable to identify error patterns which occur only during transient state changes.